


A la Map

by BuildingGsr



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:34:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27742339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BuildingGsr/pseuds/BuildingGsr
Summary: Season/Episode:right after the end of episode "A la cart" (8x02)The team share some drinks after their rounds in the go-cart track. The beginning of the relationship between Grissom and Sara comes out, Lady Heather and what will happen to the team now that their relationship has come out. At the end of the afternoon, Grissom and Sara share an intimate moment when Sara narrates something about the days in the desert.
Relationships: Gil Grissom/Sara Sidle
Kudos: 10





	A la Map

**Author's Note:**

> _I've written this fic in 2011 and was first published on GSR Italian Forum "CSI-Lovekit". The Italian title of this fic, "A la cartina" is a word pun of the original title of 8x02 episode "A la cart" ["cartina" means "map"]._
> 
> * * *

The group of CSIs run for almost an hour around the go-cart track, overtaking and cutting off each other, using every possible trick – more or less polite – to stand out.

“That's not fair!” Greg exclaimed, taking off his helmet, when they stopped.

“It's not my fault, if you're a dud...” Warrick replied, patting his shoulder.

“Shame on you, Greg,” Nick intervened, “for being overtook by Doc, who was driving with just one hand...”

“He almost ran me off the track!” the young man protested more vehemently.

“C'mon Greg,” Sara tried to console him, welcoming his friend out of the course and taking him by the arm. “Better luck next time,” she added, heading toward the exit with him.

“If Grissom doesn't get in the way,” Greg grumbled.

“What do I have to do with this?” asked Grissom, who had reached them and was now walking by Sara's left side.

“You've been putting a stick in my wheel all time long,” Greg pointed out annoyed.

“I didn't see any stick,” Grissom sneered. “Except from Doc's,” he clarified, turning to Doc Robbins who was following them along with Nick and Warrick.

“C'mon Greg,” Catherine comforted him affectionately, reaching him and taking him, her too, by his other arm. “Next time we'll let you win, ok?”

“Next time we'll play on an a ground I know I can win,” Greg murmured.

“I hope you're not thinking to a chessboard,” Sara remarked a bit maliciously, “because I'm afraid you'd be in trouble again.”

“What are you complaining about, anyway?” Nick at his back asked, messing up his hair. “You didn't win, but you're however arm in arm with two women...what more do you want?”

“Yeah,” Greg replied uncertainly, “Unfortunately, one of them is already engaged, with my boss on top of that, so, if I want to keep my job, I have to give up seducing her...” Grissom smiled with satisfaction. “And the other one...” Greg stopped talking and stared at Catherine with indulgent eyes.

“She's not for you,” she concluded, not giving room to doubt.

“Here it is,” Greg commented with disappointment.

Once out, Warrick proposed to have a drink together, pointing out that it was a very long time that they didn't do it and that Sara's rescue was an event that had to be celebrated. Everyone agreed, but Doc Robbins had to decline.

“With Mrs. Robbins we had planned an appointment for tonight weeks ago, and I really want not to fall into her anger,” he explained.

So the group left and in short time they were at the place they had decided.

*

They sat at the table and left their orders to the waiter. They waited for their drinks chatting quietly: Greg restarted the argument about the laps on the go-cart course with Warrick and everyone joined the discussion. Only Grissom and Sara sat aside, commenting between each other the jokes and the replies of their colleagues. At one moment Grissom drew closer to Sara, whispering something at her ear, sure that nobody would have seen him since they were distracted by Greg and Warrick's discussion. His hope proved to be groundless, though, because Nick, sat across the table, noticed their intimacy and involved all his friends.

“Just look at them...” he said with a louder volume of voice and with a friendly disgusted tone. “Two doves in love!”

Everyone stopped speaking and turned their gazes towards Grissom and Sara. Caught by surprise and feeling embarrassed by all those eyes on them, they outdistanced one from the other, trying to put themselves together.

“I can't believe that,” Nick continued, speaking to Sara, “you blushed!”

“I really don't think so,” she replied drily – even though her blushing, in spite of her trying to hide it, intensified. “However, even if that was the case, I don't think it's very gallant on your side to make it noticed,” she pointed out, trying to appear austere.

On Nick's face flourished a seemingly benevolent smile, and he continued his assault as he found something to have fun with.

“So, tell us Sara, what did you have to do to make him surrender?” he impudently asked, squinting at Grissom.

“What?” she exclaimed. “I really did nothing,” she gave back. “And, by the way, it's not your business.”

“I believe it _is_ my business, instead!” Nick quickly gave back. “He's my boss, after all,” he held forth.

Sara shrugged not giving that much importance and Nick glared at her, still unsatisfied. All the others waited his rebut, while handing each other the drinks the waiter had just brought at the table.

“Please, don't tell me that he used the old story of the butterfly collection,” he resumed after a sip from his glass, trying another side from which to attack his prey.

“Well...he indeed have a butterfly collection, so –

“Oh shut up!” Nick interrupted her friendly indignant, throwing a nut at her.

“Hey, this is gratuitous violence!” Sara reprimanded him. “Why don't you blame yourself instead, for not having noticed nothing?”

“You know, I would not count on that,” Nick contradicted her, turning his attention on Grissom. “I had understood that he made himself a girlfriend,” he asserted full of satisfaction.

“How?” asked a suddenly puzzled Grissom, who until that moment had attended Nick and Sara's dialogue with silent amusement.

“Well, you shaved your beard,” Nick started to explain, with a know-it-all behavior – Grissom furrowed his brows, asking himself how his shaving his beard denoted his sentimental situation. “You lost some weight,” Nick continued, “and I don't want to know how,” he wanted to clarify, leaving everybody sense however that he was talking about an intense sexual activity.

“It's called vegetarian diet, Nick,” Grissom made clear.

“Oh, now they call it that way?” Nick joked.

Grissom didn't even bother to offer a reply.

“Moreover,” Catherine interfered, “you started to take some days off, every now and then.”

Sara laughed.

“I told you that that would have seemed strange,” she told Grissom, affectionately reproaching him.

“However,” Nick resumed, “apparently, someone knew about the two of you...right, Greg?”

The youngest of the team was caught by surprise for being brought up in the discussion. Even Grissom, surprised by the news, turned to Sara, glancing her and clearly asking some explanations for that.

“Hey, don't look at me, I didn't open my mouth!” she defended herself.

“I told you that,” Greg explained, talking to Grissom as grinning with satisfaction. “My family think I inherited a particularly sensitive sixth sense and, because of this, I'm able to understand things that others can't –

He could not finish his speech that he was inundated with whistles, nuts and paper balled up napkins. Everything stopped only when Catherine drew everybody's attention – with Greg's great relief.

“Hey, wait! Brass already knew about them, I'm sure!” she exclaimed.

The group stared at her waiting for the continuation.

“How can you tell that?” Warrick urged her.

“Do you remember that some time ago we had that case with Lady Heather found in that Wild West park?” Sara tensed up – just hearing the name of that woman provoked her an ulcer – and Grissom took a deep breath, knowing that the discussion was heading toward a delicate topic.

“Well,” Catherine continued, “during one of the inspections, I asked Jim to tell me what he knew about Grissom and Lady Heather.” Sara could not avoid a grimace, although she was trying to maintain her self-control. “And he replied that, his words, _he knew something juicer that Grissom and Lady Heather,_ ” she concluded theatrically.

She waited the others to do one plus one and understand what she was telling them.

“I'm sure he was talking about them!” she eventually added, pointing Grissom and Sara.

The glance seeking an explanation showed up now on Sara's face as she turned to Grissom: _we had decided that nobody had to know, why does Jim know?_ Grissom tried to act casual, but all those looks on him made him forced to offer an explanation.

“He intimidated me,” he lied.

“Oh, come on!” everyone exclaimed, disappointed and surprised that he could lie so openly, while Sara's gaze warned _We'll deal with that at home_.

“About that,” Catherine said then, turning to Sara with her classical voice of when she wanted to gossip, “did you know that Grissom would have spent that night at Heather's?”

The question surprised Sara, but she tried to downplay it. “Sure,” she reply nonchalantly.

Catherine blinked, puzzled and, maybe, a bit deluded. To the same extent, surprise caught Grissom too, who turned to Sara perplexed, knowing very well that things were not exactly like that.

“And...that didn't bother you?” Catherine asked disoriented, trying to hit a nerve.

“No,” Sara replied, without batting an eye.

The whole group stood silent for a moment, but then a chorus of _Come on!_ and _No one trusts you_ and laughs took over.

“I don't understand why that's so strange to believe...” Sara pointed out, trying to carry on the character of an open-minded woman who easily accept that her partner spend the night in the house of another woman – a woman like Lady Heather.

“After all these years, do you think we don't get when someone's lying?” an astonished Nick asked.

“Well,” Sara wanted to make clear, “you had to see your faces that time I told you that I had left a catatonic kid in my car,” she threw in his face with a laugh.

“Ah,” Nick snorted, “that was many years ago, and that was an unfair play,” he said shaking his head.

“His eyes,” Sara continued pointing Grissom, “almost jumped out his head, Catherine was turning pale for her holding her breath...” She couldn't finish, laughing for that recollection.

“You've always been a swindler,” Nick protested. “Like that time of the Murder Central, do you remember? I'm sure you too had never heard that term before,” he muttered, remembering the annoyance he felt when Sara, at his question of explanation about that term, played the know-it-all asking him how was that he never heard it. “And you,” Nick continued, turning to Grissom with an accusing tone, “you have always covered her back.”

The supervisor shook his head. “I really don't know what you're talking about,” he lied.

Nick snorted again. “It's impossible to talk with you,” he protested, seeing that he was not able to undermine their armor.

There was some calm afterward, as everybody sipped their drinks.

“So, what will happen now?” Greg asked at one moment.

His question was referring to what would happen to the team: since the relationship between Grissom and Sara had come out, one of the two had to change shift. Grissom and Sara shared a look, for a moment, then was Sara to answer.

“Now, the team will have to face the problem to be a man down,” she explained, with a bitter smile. “Or, better, a _woman_ down,” she specified.

“So you're the one who will move?” Greg asked, with a sad tone.

Sara was his favorite partner at work as well as one of his best friend out of work, so he felt honestly dejected for not having her around anymore. Sara looked at him with affection.

“Yeah,” she replied with a serious face. She lowered her gaze and added, “Grissom offered, but I think it's fairer this way...” she confessed.

A moment of silent reflection followed.

“Well, that means that I'll sleep like a log, finally at normal times, thinking to you,” Sara resumed.

She made her look, which pretended to be happy, fly over her colleagues. When it landed on Grissom, though, all the sadness that that situation made rise in herself shone through. Grissom hinted a forced smile, then he lowered his eyes, bending his head in the way he did it when he didn't like something. Everyone noticed that movement and could only imagine the difficulties their colleagues had to face.

“You sleeping like a log? It's hard to believe...” Nick pointed out after some moment, with a palely ironic tone and an affectionate smile.

Sara reciprocated it with a glance saying but _What else can I do?_

The chat soon turned on more frivolous topics and so the team spent the afternoon.

*

  
“Do you want to go home?” Grissom asked Sara when they got into the car, at the end of the afternoon, after everybody had already left.

“No,” she replied.

Thus, Grissom turned on the engine and he drove around the city, passing through avenues and by-ways, sunny and shade areas. That was something they used to do: driving without a particular destination, and stop in a place that inspired them. _It's not certainly very eco-friendly_ , Sara pointed out once, but they liked that, it helped to clear their minds.

They took something to eat and they stopped only when they arrived on top of an hill dominating Lake Mead.

They got off the car – Grissom pulled the door open for Sara and helped her to get off – and they sat on the edge of the hill, staring at the landscape. The day was drawing to its close: the colors were taking golden tints and the air brought with itself perfumes and smells that in daytime seemed to rest, hidden somewhere, getting ready to bloom in the evening.

“ _That branch of the lake of Como which extends southwards between two unbroken chains of mountains, and is all gulfs and bays..._ ”

Grissom's voice broke their silence and his words seems to come from an ancient time. Notwithstanding, Sara found something fun to say.

“This is Lake Mead, Griss...” she ironically remarked.

Grissom was caught unawares from that kind of observation and gave a short laugh. He put his arm around Sara's shoulders and drew her nearer.

“It's from _The Betrothed_ by Alessandro Manzoni, one of the most important works of Italian literature,” he explained.

“Sometimes I wonder if you're really human,” Sara pointed out with a smile, not moving her gaze from the landscape in front of them.

“Why?” Grissom asked somewhat worried.

“It's not humanly possible to store into a brain the amount of notions you know,” Sara explained.

He reflected on that. “I think it's just a matter of training, I suppose,” he said then.

Sara felt as if he was apologizing for that characteristic of his and smiled for that.

“And what this book is about? I bet there's someone marrying.”

Grissom ironically praised her deductive abilities and then narrated the plot of the work. When he arrived to tell her the very end of the novel, Sara protested.

“Hey, you spoiled the finale!”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” he exclaimed sorrowfully, adding that he was sure she was not interested in reading the book.

“Well, that means that, in order to make it up to me, you'll read that book to me...” she threatened him.

“It's a very long book,” he said, hoping she gave up her idea.

“I have lot of time and no hurry,” she replied.

Feeling without escape, Grissom agreed to her request, promising that, as soon as possible, they would start the reading.

They came back staring at the landscape, listening to the silence around them and the sounds of their own thoughts. No need for words between them, now more than ever: they both knew what the other was thinking. What else could they think to?

Just now, that they needed to stay closer to each other after what happened to Sara, they would have spent less time together than they had throughout all the past years. Just now, that they had found the perfect balance between _them_ and _work_ , creating an area of intersection between those two sets and managing – they thought – to go away with it under everybody's eyes. Everything had run smoothly until that moment: to talk as colleagues in front of the others, and as lovers when they were alone, had made their relationship even more thrilling and intriguing – though their relationship was a deception towards their colleagues but, more importantly, to their friends.

Everything had run smoothly and would have run so for long time on, if it was not for Natalie...

This time was Sara's atonic voice to break the silence.

“I saw the wolves, the night I was under the car,” she said. “They were so close that I could smell them, see their nails sticking out under the hair on their paws...I could see their eyes.” She stopped speaking, feeling again the fear she had felt. “Cold, frank, steady eyes, focused on a probable and easy prey.” For an instant she seemed to come back to reality, turning to Grissom with an uncertain smile. “Prey, that in their opinion, was me,” she added. He hinted a smile and caressed her hair, almost trying to give her some additional force. “Then there was the thunder.”

Sara's voice come back absent and her gaze turned again to the landscape. She followed the slopes of the mountains in front of them, but was feeling only the deep dark and the stingy cold of a rainy night in the desert.

Since she left the hospital, Sara had never told Grissom any detail of the night and the day she had spent in the desert. He had asked nothing about that, fearing that his questions could crack Sara's psychic and physical process of restoration. The questions to which she had had to answer during the investigation on her case were enough, he had thought, to add some more to satisfy his own curiosity.

Just every now and then, when he saw her eyes becoming distant, he moved close and asked, gently and as more tactful as he could, if she was fine. In those moments, she suddenly stared at him as if he was the saving anchor allowing her to come out from the darkness, the cold and the suffocating heat of those hours she went through alone in the desert. But then, after a instant, her eyes saw _him_ again and with a smile she answered that she was fine. She never talked about that, she had just hinted at that from time to time; but now, it seemed that she was trying to empty a bit that sack dwelling within herself. Grissom listened to her in religious silence, with a sting in his stomach remembering him that he had not been able to spare her all that.

“The thunder scared the wolves and they run away,” Sara resumed, remembering how much relieved she felt and her oath of thanking every single thunder she would have heard from that moment on, in the case she managed to survive.

“Then, the rain started to pour down...I could hear the noise of its drops on the chassis of the car...the space filled and the water kept raising...” she took a long breath, leaning closer to Grissom. He wrapped his fingers about her shoulder more tightly. “But my arm was blocked under the car and I could not move...”

Grissom kept listening to her in silence, but the sting to his stomach caused him a kind of nausea and as Sara's narration proceeded that sting became stronger, contracting his face in a mask of regret. She related how she got out from under the car, how she sought a shelter from the rain and how she started to set out as the sun rose. Her clothes dried up quickly and she “prepared herself to have a long walk”. With a smile she remembered her finding a map.

“Can you believe that...?” she asked, acknowledging the irony of her situation, “I was in the middle of the desert, no landmarks and I find this map: a beautiful, big black dot, with the inscription _You are here_...” She threw an explicative look on Grissom and the tension of her narration grew weak for a moment.

“After that, I can't remember very clearly,” she said, narrowing her eyes as if that helped her to look deeper in her memory. “I think I did sums,” she said with faltering voice. “Yes, I did sums to keep my mind vigilant, but then...I don't know, I think I stopped to have some rest...” She reflected on that. “Which I should not have done, because if you never found me...” she added in a whisper.

“You did very good,” Grissom said point-black. “And we found you,” he added, trying to find something positive in all that event.

Sara lowered her eyes on her fingers stretching out the plaster around her arm.

“And then,” a sudden happy smiled bloomed on her lips, “ when I opened my eyes again, you were there,” she remembered with dreamy voice.

“A little bit late,” he pointed out, with disappointment.

She softly laughed. “You always arrived a little bit late with me,” she lovingly brought to his attention, “but you arrived at last,” she added sweetly, giving him a kiss.

They came back staring at the landscape and both thought to the day they understood that a new life was in store for them, together.

“Nine years...?” Sara asked of Grissom out of the blue, glancing towards him as asking a confirmation of that.

He went with his mind to Ecklie and his embarrassed rough question seeking to know when they relationship began. Then, his mind, as he looked at Sara's smiley eyes, led him to that day of nine year before when they first met.

“Yeah, nine years,” he murmured.


End file.
